Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tuesday May 23, 2006 @04:02PM
from the thousands-of-pasty-white-geeks-cry-out-in-terror dept.

lyonsden writes "Apple and Nike are teaming up to provide runners a system to integrate their shoes and their iPod. A $30 antenna will connect an iPod nano with special shoes to provide pedometer functions."

Below is an email correspondence with customer service representatives at iPOD iD, an on-line service that lets people buy personalized iPOD shoes. The dialog began when iPOD cancelled an order for a pair of shoes customized with the word "sweatshop." [get the latest on this story at shey.net]

Your iPOD iD order was cancelled for one or more of the following reasons.

1) Your Personal iD contains another party's trademark or other intellectual property.2) Your Personal iD contains the name of an athlete or team we do not have the legal right to use.3) Your Personal iD was left blank. Did you not want any personalization?4) Your Personal iD contains profanity or inappropriate slang, and besides, your mother would slap us.

If you wish to reorder your iPOD iD product with a new personalization please visit us again at www.iPOD.comThank you,iPOD iD

My order was canceled but my personal iPOD iD does not violate any of the criteria outlined in your message. The Personal iD on my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes was the word "sweatshop." Sweatshop is not: 1) another's party's trademark, 2) the name of an athlete, 3) blank, or 4) profanity. I choose the iD because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes. Could you please ship them to me immediately.

Thank you for your quick response to my inquiry about my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes. Although I commend you for your prompt customer service, I disagree with the claim that my personal iD was inappropriate slang. After consulting Webster's Dictionary, I discovered that "sweatshop" is in fact part of standard English, and not slang. The word means: "a shop or factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions" and its origin dates from 1892. So my personal iD does meet the criteria detailed in your first email.

Your web site advertises that the iPOD iD program is "about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are." I share iPOD's love of freedom and personal expression. The site also says that "If you want it done right...build it yourself." I was thrilled to be able to build my own shoes, and my personal iD was offered as a small token of appreciation for the sweatshop workers poised to help me realize my vision. I hope that you will value my freedom of expression and reconsider your decision to reject my order.

You realize that Nike hasn't run sweatshops for a long time now right? The factories in Asia used to be contracted by Nike to produce shoes, so Nike did not own them. After all the bad PR they moved in and took over the factories and now the people have very nice working conditions and earn a much higher than average wage compared to the rest of the countries over there. If you would like to end sweatshops, try talking to Adidas, Rebook, etc, which still do use sweatshop in Asia.

Interesting. The last time I recall the issue coming up was when Nike was claiming in their advertisements that they had improved conditions for the sweatshop workers and that they were not sweatshops anymore. I remember this because they were sued for false advertising, but the court ruled that while Nike's claims were in fact false, their lie was protected by the 1st Ammendment.This was from an article linked by/. a couple years ago, so anything resembling detail is gone. Except the "it's okay for the

The distinction is irrelevant. Nike dictates all the terms to the sweatshops that make Nike shoes and they are specifically culpable for their decision to stop doing business in Korea and Taiwan after those sweatshops unionized to seek out cheaper, more exploitative places elsewhere.http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/sweatshops/nike/ [globalexchange.org]

You are regurgitating Nike propoganda, which has been demonstrated to be false. Nike is not responding to bad publicity by addressing the problem, they are responding on

It's not like the natives had jobs before the companies came in.
Over time what happens is the sweat shop given the right infrastructure,
the people become self reliant and form their own companies.
Wasn't japan, korea, taiwan once sweatshop to american companies.
Now they kick our collective arses in electronics, automobiles & other industries.
it's not all the gloom & doom antiglobalization zealot makes it out to be.

Sure, in this country $2 a day is impossible to live on, especially for a family. But in OTHER countries $2 has the equivalent buying power for hundreds of $ a day. This is one of the biggest short comings of protesters in America: not every place on the planet has the same level of inflation or equivalent prices for food/objects as in the US. Do some research, find out how much the average livable wage in a country is before condeming a company for paying their employees those wages.

Thats bull. Take for instance China (Xining - the capital of Qinghai province), the GDP of an individual was $800... while its a little higher than $2 a day, its not much, and people in that city enjoy clean water, well-built houses, and electricity.

The American-centric attitude that people have really just makes me sick. Try going to a different country before making all these claims about how we're treating other people so badly - they have the option to take that job or not, and the people that have th

I actually played with that site a few years back to see which terms were acceptable and which weren't, and it appeared that the word 'labor' was not allowed.
Strange considering 'labor' is a fitting term to what one might do in running shoes.

Intelligent first posts are now a 'subscriber bonus,' really. If you give/. a bunch of cash they let you see stories a few minutes early, and if you happened to have previously requested a mildly inappropriately labeled iPod from Apple (or known where to get text of an order like this) you're suddenly five steps ahead of everyone else.
As long as you know how to use a text editor, that is.

Most informed people who complain about sweatshops aren't complaining about what we might consider low wages. Rather, they are complaining about the long hours and poor working conditions. Just because these jobs might be better then the alternatives doesn't absolve the company of the moral responsiblity not to work these people like slaves just because it's "better then what they had before".

If these companies paid a fair wage and provided good working conditions, you would see very few people complaining.

Of course, you never see any of the workers or potential workers in those countries complaining, and there's a reason for that: Nike and other "sweatshop" owners provided far better jobs than were normally available to people in those countries. People FOUGHT to get a spot in one of those factories.

Aren't you skipping the part about if you complain, you're out, and if you try to organize complaints, you're possibly even dead.

ok, there is actually some cool stuff involved here.1) It's not just a pedometer... if it's anything like the other Nike running gear, it actually uses an accelerometer and some other crazy stuff to figure out how far you're running. Instead of just saying that a single step = X number of feet it tries to figure out how far you really moved your foot.

2) As others have mentioned, it actually reads the status to you so you don't have to look at your iPod as you run.

What would be very cool is if it would attempt to match the beats per minute of your song to your actual steps per minute, so you could run to music at whatever pace you wanted to. I think iTunes has a BPM field, so you could probably at least have the iPod choose songs that were close to your pace (so you could have different pump-up, running, and cool-down music), but I don't know if you can easily alter the playback speed of an MP3 without altering it's pitch to do exact cadence matching. I wonder if it has enough processor overhead to do on-the-fly resampling.

I've wondered about combination products like this in the past and I do not see the advantage. Here is an example..You can buy a string trimmer (weed whacker) that has a connection at the bottom that allows other sold seperately components to be attached, like a small saw, a lawn edger, a very small almost useless roto-tiller etc.. The problem is the attachments cost very close too and in some cases MORE a dedicated lawn edger, a small useless roto tiller and a small tree saw. I guess the advantage is on

"Perhaps the most recognisable 'gag' from the show was Maxwell Smart's shoe phone, which has become somewhat of a comic icon: Smart would communicate with CONTROL using a rotary-dialled telephone concealed in his shoe, similar to a modern cell phone. While such a device was decades ahead of its time in real life, the nee

First, I doubt you'll make it through the metal/bomb detector with them. So you'll have to stick them on the conveyor belt. Imagine the reaction from the TSA person when they see the X-Ray of your shoes. I'd allow at least another 45 minutes to get to your gate.

Also, what happens when your transmitter interferes with the airplane's navigation radios?

Put your iPod in a clear transparent (and waterproof, just to be safe) case that adds a wireless connector which then uses Bluetooth to talk to your toilet seat. While you pinch a loaf it weighs you, takes your temperature, scans your dump as it passes the "sensor ring", and gives you helpful dietary suggestions along with playing a preset song that you've associated with one of a half-dozen air freshener options.

You joke, but I'm pretty sure some of those crazy Japanese electro-toilets do stuff like this. Maybe they analyze your urine and not your -- as you so delicately put it -- "loaf." If they don't actually exist, then someone was seriously considering making one, because the article I read (this was at least a year or so ago) was quite serious in tone.

I wonder how people would feel about being told they're pregnant by their toilet?

A supersmall step sensor for your shoe with wireless transmitter, a wireless receiver, iPod integration, timer, text-to-speach interface, "booster song with 1 keypress", recording all your trips and comparing them over the internet, and Apple and Nike behind it - I was expecting that gear to cost at least $50 to $80, and I'm pretty sure the people that are interested would have paid that amount without thinking about it - but only $29? That is one seriously low price. Wow, what happened, are they subsidizing this one or something?

And if they do, how do they make sure we are buying nike shoes? That step counter can be taped to any shoe, can't it?

but only $29? That is one seriously low price. Wow, what happened, are they subsidizing this one or something?

Based on this [macsimumnews.com] I assume what we have here is an off-the-shelf wireless mouse circuit. When you're running it's doing "click click click click click", and the iPod end might even be the USB connector for the mouse. So, $29 is in the ballpark for a COTS wireless mouse, plus you don't have to build any of the rest of the mouse other than the left-click button. Somebody gets the "elegant, simple" awar

Corporations like Apple and Nike promoting their brands through a synergystic crossover product? Get out of here! Next thing you'll tell me that they're going to get professional athletes and rock stars to promote this thing.

This must be part of the wireless patents Apple filed for a while back. I would not at all be surprised if this idea of wireless integration gets incorporated into more and more things. Imagine if you could carry your ipod with you all day and have it work automatically with your home stereo, shoes, car, etc. The ipod could become much more than an mp3 player, and could help collect data (pedometer, etc) and stream music to different sources automatically.

This seems like exactly the thing Jobs and Apple would pursue, a seamless system of wireless integration would perfectly embody their philosophies of style, power, simplicity, and having things 'just work'. It may be just a new shoe accessory right now, but I for one could see this type of technology evolving into new areas

Pedometers do not cut it for distance measurement. Almost everyone uses a GPS unit these days. Interestingly enough, the only company still pushing a pedometer-driven system these days is Nike. At SOME point they are going to get on the GPS bandwagon but I'm uncertain why they are taking so long to get 'cutting edge in this area.'

OT - That banner ad for Crystal Reports just brought my computer to a crawl.

To myself, who I'd consider to be a reasonably serious athlete, I prefer the food pods to GPS for a few reasons. They're typically smaller, but most importantly, they aren't automatically destroyed by large buildings or tree cover. Living in areas where I would run on trails surrounded by large trees, or in downtown with large buildings, I would constantly lose GPS signals and so my distance, pace, and maps of my runs would be way off in areas. The foot pods can be calibrated by you on a track to make them accurate to your stride, and are +/- 1% after doing that typically, which is better than my GPS was by far. Now they have downsides as well (elevation gain typically isn't measured), but they're better than losing signal for some of us.

Do you think that this is the same as the inertial foot pods? I hesitate to say so. The initial pods from Polar are about $150. The HRM Watch + footpod from Nike is over $300.If this is an inertial pod-- or merely a transmitter for one embedded into the shoe -- then it's a fantastic deal (depending on the cost of the shoe). The quoted price is only $29. If it's just a pedometer, then it's pretty useless.

I always that that it would be great to integrate HRM and iPod. Spoken stats (easier than trying to read

Looking at the links on Apple's site, it shows that the run data can also be synced with your computer once you get back from the run. The data includes stuff like speed, distance, calories burned, etc, so you can see your progress over a length of time. As a former cross country and track runner, this is the kind of information that we had to calculate manually (well, at least record the numbers and then crunch them) to get an overall view of our progress and goals. Also, it would be cool to have since I'd already be bringing my iPod on a run, and wouldn't need to bring a seperate electronic pedometer along (and I'd be willing to be the electronic pedometers out there that track the same information and sync with a computer don't work with Macs).

I’ve long envisioned a system where the armband I wear at the gym has sensors woven into it that connect to the iPod. It would take my pulse and blood pressure and have the iPod speak the important numbers and stats to me over the headphones.

That won't short out when you do the swimming portion.And, has anyone thought of having it make your shoes shuffle when you set the iPod on "shuffle"?

Nike: Just Do It But First Pay Money

Seriously, though, as a former marathon runner (2 hr 29 minutes back when the world record was 2 hr 14 minutes), I question the practical utility of an integrated shoe to iPod link - sure, it's nice to know your approximate pedometer rating, but in reality that is not a real number, only an estimation based on your running s

My problem is my left foot is slightly wider than my right foot. It's a bit of a challenge to find one that's wide enough to accomodate the left foot while being able to support the right foot. New Balance has been very consistent for me over the years. I usually go with Red Wings shoes for special occasions and Sears work boots when I need a steel toe for the job.

At first this sounded absolutely retarded to me.. then after thinking about it I saw potential uses. If the iPod can be smart enough to see when you start to slow down, or where your "problem areas" are when jogging compared to previous runs (I don't jog, so who knows if these things exist) if it can modify your random selections to play something with faster tempo, it might be worthwhile.. likewise if it can slow things down on your cool down..

Says the BBC [bbc.co.uk]: "Although 60% of factories monitored achieved an A or B rating in terms of compliance with agreed standards, a quarter of factories were found to present more serious problems.
These ranged from a lack of basic terms of employment and excessive hours of work to unauthorised sub-contracting, confirmed physical or sexual abuse and the existence of conditions which could lead to death or serious injury."

Cool. That means as of 13 April, 2005 only in 40% of the factories used by Nike workers face a lack of basic terms of employment and excessive hours of work, unauthorised sub-contracting, confirmed physical or sexual abuse and the existence of conditions which could lead to death or serious injury. I'm off to by a pair of Nikes.Seriously, this is the first major goof since Steve Jobs came back to Apple.

How does a quarter of factories equal 40%?Now, while I agree that the sweatshops of the kind used by almost every overseas manufacturer is despicable, your twisting of the argument by fudging the numbers doesn't help your case. Remember, "C" is considered an average rating. If 60% of their factories are above average, thats pretty good. And only 25% fall into the "serious problems" category. That means that 15% are in the average range. If anything, Nike should be commended for making such a turn-around fro

I've been running for about five years now (competitively and otherwise) and almost every pair of shoes I've owned, whether they were for training or competition have come from Adidas. Same thing with a lot of the people I run with. Adidas just makes good shoes without lots of flash and hype. If Apple had partnered with Adidas I'd at least be considering getting this, it sounds interesting. Of course, one of the reasons Apple chose Nike for this was because of all the hype and flash and recognition they bri

I love the Garmin (worn like a wrist watch, but makes a Casio GShock look tiny), but hate the fact that GPS and large buildings do not really match. Living in Berlin there is no way to avoid them without getting out of town first. I always run the same route and the

It appears that if I put MP3 player hardware in random everyday objects, there are plenty of people who would buy them.

Shoes, cell phones, PDAs are taken, how about underwear? Lingerie? Things that are commonly inserted into body cavities? Keychains? Sunglasses? Scarves? Things people put in their hair to hold it in place or as decoration? Sweatbands? Bracelets or anklets?

Hell, put them in fruits and vegetables, bags of junk food, suppositories of various kinds, nicotine patches, beverage containers...

On both their parts. While joggers might not be a huge percentage of total mp3 player sales, I'd bet almost everyone who jogs anymore either has or plans to buy one. Apple may have just swallowed them all up. The data tracking function is probably a much bigger deal to those types than lardasses like er.. us realize. Nike gets to sell people another pair of overpriced shoes (probably moreso than usual) and horn in on Apple's brand recognition. Nike might be big in the shoe racket, but those Nike branded Phillips players didn't exactly take the world by storm.